Down the Hole

How to describe Soph-Frosh SING! 2020? I would tell you, but the scene got cut. Sagely, with Wonderland, Soph-Frosh decided on a theme that would justify the nonsensicality of their plot, which was matched only by the incomprehensibility of their actors despite being the only show with functioning microphones.

Q: Hey, Tweedle Dee, why are we still in the show when they had to cut everything but the bare bones?

A: To get to the other side!

The show started out strong, with a repurposed “Mr. Blue Sky,” saying exactly the opposite of what Mr. Blue Sky says. With the bar set high, the audience waited for the rest of the show with anticipation and was let down when the sophomores and freshman promptly proceeded to miss the bar they had set for themselves again and again.

I will say, though, that I’d love to see Grandpa Oliver Holmann’s anti-aging regime—by way of some miracle, he managed to look even younger than his granddaughter Lara Ongan, whose performance as a clueless Alice swept away from the stresses of daily life and into the chaos of Wonderland was vocally inspiring amidst the insanity of Soph-Frosh SING!.

Soph-Frosh SING! seemed to want to model itself after Fight Club, with its mysterious “Rule” coming up over and over again and being explained exactly zero times. The first rule of “The Rule” is you don’t talk about “The Rule.” So serious was “The Rule” that the Queen of Spades (and Alice’s grandmother, once again unexplained, though she at least looked older than Alice) was stripped of her royal status and thrown in a jail, which looked somehow flimsier than the show’s plot.

Of course, all this eventually came to a rushed ending that clearly had to be put together after half the script and all the characterizations were cut, culminating in a spasming dance party finale.